ForteRetainer
forteRetainer's element is francium (atomic number 87). Description Your CHUMHANDLE is forteRetainer. You changed that from forteHolder when a chum suggested that the latter didn't "sound Frenchy enough". You don't mind. Holding fortes is what you are all about and retaining them is no different. Actually you are so very much about holding fortes that your name conceals not just a double or a triple but a QUADRUPLE MEANING. WHAAAT. That's kind of your whole THING. See, your overall passion for LINGUISTICS incorporates an inordinate love of OBSCURE WORDPLAY. You like to be PRETENTIOUS about that. Hopefully no one can figure out that your ARROGANT ATTITUDE actually conceals some secret SELF-ESTEEM ISSUES because it would totally BLOW if they did. Besides LINGUISTICS, you also enjoy a WIDE VARIETY OF ARTSY-FARTSY ACTIVITIES ranging from ACTING to CREATIVE WRITING to PLAYING THE PIANO, the last of which contributes one of the MEANINGS of your CHUMHANDLE. On the physical end of the spectrum, your favorite pursuit is FENCING, for which reason you've allocated RAPIERKIND to your STRIFE SPECIBUS. (And which also contributes one of the MEANINGS of your CHUMHANDLE.) The FETCH MODUS you use for your SYLLADEX is the PRUFFANITY MODUS. Believe it or not, there's no real significance to the fact that that name reads like a misspelled rendering of "PROFANITY". You're just so unbelievably good with the OBSCURE WORDPLAY that you coined "PRUFFANITY" as a DAZZLINGLY WITTY MASHUP of the names of the two FETCH MODI which you fused to create this one. Honestly, though, the association with PROFANITY is kind of helpful after all, considering that the only way you can possibly describe this MODUS is to say that it is pretty F*CKING GODDAMN SWEET. Pruffanity Modus whaaaat? forteRetainer’s first fetch modus was the PRIORITY MODUS. It wasn’t the absolute easiest modus on the market but it was pretty simple to understand. Whenever FR captchalogued an item, he would assign it a priority value between 1 and X, where X was the total number of cards in the deck. (The priority had to be a whole number, and couldn’t match that of any other item already stored.) At any time, FR could only retrieve the item with the highest priority of all the occupied cards in the deck. Obviously that meant if he wanted to fetch a lower-priority card he’d first have to eject the higher-priority cards which was a bummer. So the modus was restricted in that way. But it was also flexible, in that every time he recaptchalogued an item he could assign it a new priority value, adjusted up or down to match the new situation, so as to minimize tedious item dumping. Altogether it was a pretty great modus and he had some good times with it. Then he got a new modus, the HUFFMAN MODUS. This modus played off David A. Huffman’s algorithm for data compression based on “weights”. Whenever FR captchalogued a new item, it was given a base weight of 1. Then, every time he recaptchalogued the same item, its weight went up by +1. The idea obviously was that items that he retrieved, used, and stored over and over would get “heavier” and “heavier”. The catch was that he could only use the heaviest card in the deck at any time. Again, he’d need to dump heavier cards to access lighter ones. This struck FR as pretty much the same principle as the PRIORITY MODUS, but less flexible since weight automatically increased while priority was manual. So he decided to use his MODUS CONTROL DECK to combine the two into a totally new fetch modus, which he now uses. This modus uses both the concepts of priority and weight. Whenever FR captchalogues a new item, he gives it a priority between 1 and X, and it gets an automatic weight of 1. And whenever he recaptchalogues the same item, he assigns it a new priority and its weight goes up by +1. The total of these two values for any one card is called that card’s harshness. Now the cool thing is that FR is not restricted to just using the harshest card in the deck. Instead, he can use any card with a harshness between Y-(X/3) and Y, where Y is the value of the harshest card in the deck. So, for instance, if his deck contains 12 cards at the moment, and the harshest among them has a value of 8, then he can access any card with a harshness between 8-(12/3) and 8 – that is, between 4 and 8. PRIORITY + HUFFMAN -> PRiorITY + hUFFmAN -> PRUFFANITY A pretty f*cking awesome name for a pretty f*cking awesome modus. Pardon my French. Category:Retired Characters